Workers Caught Stealing Gas

Jackson City Workers Caught Stealing Gas

August 10, 2005

JACKSON, MS

Jackson police are investigating city workers for the theft of gas, according to WLBT TV. They're not driving off from the pumps, but using taxpayer money to fill gas tanks in their personal vehicles.... (see full article here:)
http://www.fleet-central.com/gf/t_inside.cfm?action=news_pick&storyID=20463

OK, so how does this little tidbit relate to GPS? And why do I care ... or should any business owner or government manager care ... about this relatively minuscule note of petty theft?

Well, because it's far from minuscule to those who know what's really going on in their fleets. Fuel theft and misuse have always been a problem. With fuel prices heading far too close to $3.00 a gallon it's becoming a more and more worthwhile area to devote scarce management resources to. In my commercial work I see more and more evidence of this practice going on, varying only in method and magnitude. The one common constant seems to be that management seldom knows about it until a GPS gives notice ... and management can almost never quantify it. once again, you can't manage what you can't measure.

Fuel irregularities seem to follow two broad patterns. Either employees illicitly fuel their own vehicles at their employer's fueling points or they fuel employer's vehicles and transfer fuel to their own vehicles, using the company/government vehicle as an improvised tanker .. an even grater waste of resources.

A fleet-wide GPS and proper interpretation of results will nip either practice in the bud ... at virtually no additional cost.

In the case of unsupervised refueling of private vehicles, simply correlating the time and date of fuel dispensed with an authorized vehicle physically being at the pump will flag this problem immediately. One simply designates the fueling point as a known location or zone in the system and pulls a simple report that tells what fleet vehicles were at that point and when ... any fuel deliveries that don't match are certainly worthy of investigation. Might sound like some accounting work involved here, but the minor cost of comparing two spreadsheets (easy to set up something like Excel to do this is easy and cheap) is a lot less expensive and time consuming than to hire guards or security cameras.

If the employees are going through the more labor-intensive process of fueling the employer's vehicle and then siphoning out the fuel, a decent GPS will still show this up at very little cost. One client of mine had 4 pickups doing the same basic work across his territory. One truck caught his attention via his monthly fuel bill, because it seemed to burn two or three times the fuel of any of the other three. Rather than send the wasteful truck in for maintenance, the client simply pulled a report for visits to the authorized fueling points. When asked to explain why some days the employee had consumed as many as three tankfuls, and had made frequent stops at his home, the employee resigned, citing the invasive violations of his privacy and that truck immediately returned to normal performance with anewly hired replaement driver.

It's up to you, as a manager. Does your employee's privacy extend to a license to steal, or are you willing to earn the extra money you're paid to be a supervisor/manager?